2026 CSS features, Dependabot not so open-source, ChatGPT Health

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Welcome, Developers! 👋

Today's issue: New CSS functions enable position-aware animations without scripts. PostgreSQL dominated 2025 with billion-dollar acquisitions and competing distributed projects. Dependabot's open-source core needs proprietary orchestration to function. AI generates code faster but ships 75% more logic errors without proper testing.

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🔖 The Reading Room

Articles we have hand-picked for you:

4 CSS Features Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2026

CSS now includes sibling-index() and sibling-count() functions available in stable Chrome and Safari. These allow using an element's position relative to siblings in calculations, making it easy to create staggered transitions and animations. Combine with @starting-style for elegant enter animations without JavaScript.

By Adam Argyle →

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review

PostgreSQL solidified its position as the database industry's hottest platform in 2025. Major cloud vendors launched new offerings (Microsoft HorizonDB), while Databricks paid $1b for Neon and Snowflake acquired CrunchyData for $250m. Two competing distributed PostgreSQL projects emerged: Supabase's Multigres (led by Vitess co-creator Sugu) and PlanetScale's Neki, both aiming to bring horizontal sharding to PostgreSQL for OLTP workloads.

By Andy Pavlo →

How Dependabot Actually Works

GitHub's Dependabot isn't actually a smart bot, it's a stateless Ruby library wrapped in proprietary infrastructure. The MIT-licensed dependabot-core handles parsing manifests and checking registries, but all the coordination, scheduling, and state tracking that make it work as a service remain closed source. Self-hosting means rebuilding the entire orchestration layer yourself, which requires tracking projects, scheduling jobs, managing merge requests, and maintaining vulnerability databases.

By Andrew Nesbitt →

Managing Infrastructure Across Multiple Environments

When Terraform code is duplicated across environments, infrastructure drift becomes inevitable. A Principal Software Engineer shares how copy-pasting dev configs to staging and prod led to silent security divergence that took weeks to discover. The lesson: environments need shared modules with explicit separation, not duplicated directories.

By Nishant Ghan →

AI Writes Code Faster. Your Job Is Still to Prove It Works.

Over 30% of senior developers now ship mostly AI-generated code, but errors are 75% more common in logic alone. The workflow has split: solo developers rely on automated testing to keep pace with AI speed, while teams use human review for context, security, and accountability. Whether working solo or in teams, the core principle remains the same: if you haven't proven the code works, you're just moving work downstream.

By Addy Osmani →

⏳ Back in Time

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🔗 The Link Lounge

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🧰 The Toolbox

Tools and products we're excited about today:

node-html-parser

node-html-parser is a very fast HTML parser. It generates simplified DOM trees with CSS selector query support. Designed for high-performance parsing of massive HTML files efficiently.

Learn more →

Fabricjs

Fabric.js is a powerful Javascript HTML5 canvas library. It provides interactive object models on canvas with serialization support. It includes SVG parsing, text editing, and object manipulation features.

Learn more →

tool-ui

Tool UI provides beautiful, accessible UI components for AI tool calls. Built on Radix, shadcn/ui, and Tailwind. It's open source with MIT license.

Learn more →

Swift for Android

Droid framework enables Android application development using Swift language. It provides SwiftUI-like declarative syntax for building UIs. The framework includes native Android components and completely abstracts the underlying JNI complexity.

Learn more →

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